


in my race to get out of this place i am checking my face in the back of a spoon

by paperclipbitch



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Arkham Asylum, Canon-Typical Violence, Community: fan_flashworks, Cruelty, Episode Related, Gen, Gruesome Imagery, Guilt, Mental Health Issues, Parental Death, Post-Season/Series 01 Finale, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:28:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hey, tomorrow we’ll eat your guilt with pancakes, you can start all over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in my race to get out of this place i am checking my face in the back of a spoon

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Geek Love_ by Nerina Pallot] Written for **fan_flashworks** for the prompt: _sleepless_ ; the first three ficlets were for the challenge and the second two have been added after the deadline once I had more time. Set after the season one finale.

**i.**

Harvey is drinking like a fish, and thinking about Fish, and ha, maybe that would have been funny, half a bottle ago.

His desk light is hurting his eyes and he isn’t going to ask anyone to drag the waters for a body that’s ancient history, but isn’t. 

Essen told him to go home, and he told her he would, but he didn’t. None of the other guys in the mostly empty building look at him; it’s been happening less these days, with Gordon and his insane crusade to somehow turn Gotham into something other than a shithole taking up Harvey’s time, but everyone’s used to Harvey crawling inside a bottle at his desk. It’s nothing new, nothing smart or classy or heroic, but he’s never pretended to be those things: he used to know the right people, and when to keep his head down and his mouth shut and his eyes firmly averted. 

Now he’s knee-deep in something that’s only going to get worse, not better, and Gotham is in the calm before the storm, before everything goes to hell and Harvey gets to wish Jim Gordon had just taken a bullet back when he was having his glorious military career and fucking up somebody else’s life with his infectious sense of determined justice. Sure, most of this could’ve and would’ve happened even without Jim, but Harvey would’ve just been contently caught in the maelstrom, would’ve been in a different position and wouldn’t feel the need to change the situation any.

Fish Mooney is missing, or dead, or lying so low that she’ll never be found, and Harvey doesn’t care except for all the places where he does, he does, he does.

“You’re here late.”

Leslie, Jim’s golden girl, that gentle smile she uses to set people at ease.

“So are you, Doc,” he says, and doesn’t blink, lets her look away first.

She perches on the edge of his desk, easy, and picks up the dying dregs of the whisky bottle. It’s not good stuff, because this is not an occasion for good stuff, this is an occasion for the shit that strips your throat raw as you drink it, roils in your stomach like a trapped animal, and leaves you wishing for death pretty much as soon as you swallow, don’t even think about the hangover in the morning.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

He laughs; hollow and battered and dry. “I’ve had better shrinks than you, Doc,” he says, “and your track record for this week is pretty shitty. Want to drive me to Arkham too?”

Leslie doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink. Jim’s girl, brutal eyes, almost killed by his old girl: all of this tracing back to Jim, Jim, Jim. Jim, who doesn’t know not to shit where you eat, not to shit where you might eat, not to fall for a fucking mobster before they’re a mobster and before you’re a cop and before lines have to be drawn and chosen and picked. 

“Tell him…” Harvey ducks his head, laughs, kneads his aching eyes with his fingers. “Tell him not to think he’s a hero. He can’t be. He had me thinking maybe we could all be heroes, but we’re not. One of these days the city will burn down and we’ll burn down with it and it won’t matter what side we chose or what we thought we were. Tell him to stop, before he gets anyone else killed.”

Leslie says nothing, and Harvey debates regretting what he said, decides in the end to take the whisky back from her unresisting fingers.

Her hands are small, so small, and all she says is: “feel better, now?”

Harvey wants to throw all her concern, her kindness, back in her face with enough force to bruise, to make sure she never tries to come back. He wants to shove her away from the memories he’s too scared to touch himself, let alone let someone else near them. He wants to lash out with everything left in him, but he’s so damn _tired_.

“Goodnight, Leslie,” he says instead.

“I’ll call you a cab,” she offers, and he shakes his head.

“Don’t bother,” he tells her. “Don’t… just don’t.”

Her face twists and screws and he doesn’t even know what he’s angry about, anymore. In the end, Leslie squeezes his shoulder and walks off through the department and into the night. 

Her footsteps linger long after she’s gone.

**ii.**

It isn’t smart, having a place where people can find you, but it also isn’t smart to get hypothermia and die on the cracked sidewalks of a city that doesn’t care, and at the moment Cat is hedging her bets. Gotham is drowning itself, and Cat’s pinning herself to no one’s side until she’s sure that it’ll float.

A few days ago, Gordon dropped by the penthouse. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, unshaven and unkempt, and for a moment Cat wanted to run from him and all the damnation from the last time they saw each other, but she learned more than a few things from her short time with Fish Mooney, and she stood her ground.

“Barbara…” Gordon’s voice cracked, he swallowed and shook his head and said: “I guess you know what’s happened to Barbara.”

Cat still hasn’t decided how she feels about Barbara being gone; her feelings about Barbara being _here_ were complicated enough, dripping between disdain and something that might tentatively have thought about being camaraderie, given the chance. It didn’t get the chance, though, because it turns out Barbara was hiding kind of a lot of pent-up bloodlust.

Maybe Cat would’ve been sorrier, a longer time ago, that Barbara fell apart that fast. All she can think, now, is that someone who did _that_ much day drinking should’ve cracked quicker.

Gordon looked lost, looking around the apartment, full of Barbara’s belongings left scattered around, like she was coming back sometime. Cat’s been around long enough to know that people who go to Arkham? They’re not coming back. Not ever.

“You should-” he began, and rubbed a hand over his face, and Cat debated telling him that she was sorry that she was all ready to watch him die, but maybe she wasn’t. So she stood still and watched him and didn’t say anything. “You know what?” Gordon said at last, “keep it. Stay here.”

She was surprised, but she didn’t show it. Didn’t raise an eyebrow or twitch her mouth or tilt her head.

“I guess it’d be pointless to tell you to keep out of trouble,” Gordon said, and she wondered if he was lingering, and what he was lingering for. He smiled; a shadow of something that nearly looked familiar, mangled in conjunction with the bruises on his face and the defeated slump of his shoulders. 

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Detective,” Cat told him, and watched him out.

The apartment is hers now, though she’s not sure how long she’ll stay here; not when _anyone_ could find her. It’s still waiting for Barbara to return; everything has a weird stillness, a sort of anticipation. Cat doesn’t spook easy, but it’s kind of uncomfortable.

Ivy doesn’t notice the haunted edges of the apartment: she’s too busy trying on Barbara’s clothes and jewellery, dancing on the sparkling wooden floors in shoes too high for her. They’ve already cleared out all of Barbara’s hidden stashes of pills and weed and sold them; that’ll probably be followed by anything else of value, before everything really _does_ turn to shit and the fences are flooded with stolen goods, plummeting the gain for everyone. Cat’s not completely sure what she’s going to do when that eventually happens; maybe by then she’ll have picked a side, and they’ll haul her out of the quicksand. Past experience makes that seem unlikely; but there’s got to be a first time for everything.

Cat stands with her palms against the clockface and looks out at the night, at the churning city below. Things are in freefall now, and everyone’s kind of on edge, like they’ve seen the lightning strike and are just waiting for the thunder. And somewhere out there is Bruce Wayne. She shuts her eyes for a moment, stamps angrily down on that thought, because that was a fairytale she toyed with for a few weeks but realistically there’s nothing the Wayne name can give her unless she takes it for herself. Bruce Wayne has sad eyes and the softest smiles and his hands tremble a little in her presence in a way that makes her teeth chatter, but he’s worthless to her in the long run, and if she’s going to survive this, she can’t be soft. There can’t be any tender places in her for anyone to drive in a knife.

Ivy is asleep in Barbara’s bed, puddled up in the expensive sheets, but Cat can’t sleep these days, is giving up on even trying. She can’t pinpoint when, but a break is coming, and when it does, she’s got to be ready to jump.

**iii.**

Arkham is quiet at night, with a sort of restlessness that makes it feel like being inside a pitching ship on an uncertain sea.

That might just be all these drugs, which make Barbara’s head swim and eyes itch and whole body feel like it’s made of string and secrets; secrets that were secrets before, anyway, but are probably not now. Barbara’s finding it difficult to keep things inside her head these days, everything spilling bloodily out of her mouth and hands.

Blood. Blood. Oh, that’s a thought, one of the ones they ask her not to have anymore, chained to the wall, Barbara, Barbara, _Barbara_.

They’re not particularly interested in her getting better; they just want her to be _quiet_.

“All I ever did was drink wine and wait for someone to bring your body home,” she tells Jim, who turns up more and more often these days, a wavery hallucination that looks disappointed in her. She’s not sure that she used to hallucinate before she came here, before they started forcing pills down her throat and telling her to keep her hands to herself, but how could she tell? She was pretty sure she wasn’t mad until they pried the candied red knife from her hands.

“I thought you could save me,” she adds, because as long as she isn’t screaming, no one’s going to come in and watch her talking to no one, spitting out her demons on the wall. She’s been waiting for whoever replaced Leslie to come for an appointment, tie her wrists down so she can’t do any more stabbing, talk her through everything and tell her that it wasn’t her fault, except for the parts that _were_ her fault, of course, keep a steady expression and a half-smile and make endless notes on a pad of paper. But it’s been days – years? – and no one at all has come.

At least if she’d gone to prison, she’d be allowed visitors. Maybe Renee could turn up, to look pityingly at her through the glass, delicately hold the phone with those fingers Barbara that rode like a pro, and thank fuck that she got out in time. That she climbed out of the pit and kicked Barbara in the face on her way up. She could maybe ask _why_ , and Barbara could tell her all kinds of things, none of which had to be true.

Orange isn’t exactly her colour, though.

“Are you here so I can work out my issues with you?” Barbara asks her imaginary Jim, who looks bruised and tired and stretched sort of thin, like she can’t even pretend in the vestiges of her daydreams that he’s a hero, that he’s any better than the rest of them. “How you wanted to save the city but you couldn’t even notice that _I_ needed you?”

That’s all Barbara thinks she has ever done; need, need, need, and the need has always been flung back in her face, fuck her for requiring anything. Fuck her for wanting. Fuck her for trying.

“Oh,” she adds, “and you couldn’t fuck me worth a damn.” Jim’s face finally flickers, and she thinks, _ha_. “That’s funny, right, my knight in shining armour couldn’t even make me come the way the bastards who liked me with bruises did.”

She tips her head back against the wall; her hair is lank and dirty and her nails are all broken and the other inmates look at her like _she’s_ the crazy one, like they understand anything at all. Gotham is mean and shitty and was always going to destroy her, full of people to wreck and ruin and to say _hey, tomorrow we’ll eat your guilt with pancakes, you can start all over again_.

Barbara believed for a few minutes with Jim Gordon’s ring that she could be someone other than what she is, but not even he believed that, it turns out.

Something cracks in her hallucination’s expression, and she expects him to fall in fragments of pottery and glass and shrapnel, but he doesn’t. He just stands, pulls his coat around him, knocks at her locked door.

“You can let me out now,” he says, and Barbara tilts her head, and thinks: _you should’ve loved me better._

“I should’ve done,” he agrees, and he looks sad, and the door clangs behind him, and maybe in the morning none of this will have happened at all.

**iv.**

He’d like more deference, if he’s honest. Three a.m. on a shitty wet street and the guy is kneeling before him with missing teeth and missing fingers and blood sheeting down his face and there’s still something sneering in his face.

Oswald pulls a knife and carves it out, carves until the man is gurgling and then silent and the blood turns to a sticky purple crawl.

He looks up, at the crowd watching, who’ve all fallen a step back. _Good_. He grins, rain sliding between his teeth, and demands: “anyone else?”

They scatter like the rats they are, pretenders to his throne, but they’ll fall in line in the end. Before, he didn’t have the power, didn’t have the backing, but now there’s _no one_. There’s just him. Power is fluttering from the skies and all he has to do is grab as much as he can before somebody else does. It’s his, all his. If he has to kill every little shitty human who dares to put a toe out of line and question him, then that is what he will do. Gotham can survive it; he can survive it.

His umbrella appears over his head, abruptly cutting off the downpour.

“This is why people don’t like you,” Ed says, helpfully. Even though he’s been under the umbrella for the last half hour, his glasses are flecked with rain, his slicked-back hair escaping to drift across his forehead. His eyes are big under the streetlights, lips peeling back from his teeth; violence hits him like this, with delight, with disgust, with something dark and sparkling beneath his skin Oswald can’t pretend to understand, or pretend to want to.

“They don’t need to _like_ me,” he spits, ignoring the pang of the lie, the sharp split of the desire for friendship dashing against his sides. He’d be kind, if he could be; he could be a benign ruler, if only people would let him be. But they won’t, and they have to learn _somehow_. Better in their blood than in more of his.

The GCPD is peeling outwards like a ribcage, revealing the haemorrhaging organs beneath, just begging for the shove of a knife and a brisk end. Or a twist of a knife, and a slow, wet end, sluicing piece by piece until they choke on themselves.

Edward Nygma is part of this plan, of course.

He hasn’t decided yet whether he wants to be part of this plan, vacillating with scared eyes and shaking hands, but Oswald has seen the hunger in his eyes, the desire to be _noticed_ and _acknowledged_ and _more_. He may need to rearrange some of his thought processes, but Oswald has seen Ed’s enjoyment of puzzles and questions and riddles and the way that things can change abruptly if you twist them just a little; he’ll enjoy the process of undoing himself, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

Oswald certainly did, so long ago that he’s not sure he remembers what life was like before he wanted to sink all his teeth into it and take.

“It’s okay,” Ed says, grinning at him, as they continue up the street; their heights too different and Oswald’s gait too slow for Ed’s long legs for them to be truly dignified, but it’s dark enough and late enough and Oswald’s fingers are dripping red like breadcrumbs onto the sidewalk behind them. People could laugh, but they won’t laugh for long.

“What is?” Oswald snips.

“People don’t like me either,” Ed tells him, his shrug jerking the umbrella, sending drops of water down Oswald’s neck.

This isn’t friendship; it’s not even companionship. They’re acquaintances with mutual needs that don’t cross over very often, but when they do, they can work together. Gotham runs on alliances, at least until they’re severed, sinews and arteries and shuddering.

“No,” Oswald agrees, because it’s the easiest option, “they don’t.”

 **v.**

“I suppose it’s useless to tell you to sleep.”

Alfred’s made tea, which means that he’s worried, more worried than his stoic expression is letting on. He doesn’t forget that Bruce doesn’t like tea, but sometimes things push beyond that, and he doesn’t care.

His father used to say it was a British thing, a soft amused in-joke that Bruce laughed at for years before he actually understood it. But Bruce’s father is gone and _gone_ and he’s a shivery ghost that Bruce can’t reach much these days. He wants to cling onto his parents, onto who they were, warm and friendly and loving and gods to him, gods who proved themselves to be false idols, but that’s too much metaphor and he’s been avoiding school for more reasons than just a desire for solitude.

“I’m not tired,” Bruce lies.

Alfred sighs, and his shoulders soften, and he sits down on one of the leather couches opposite Bruce. He’s still smartly dressed, still dapper and crisp and sure, and Bruce wants to cling to him when he looks like this. But he’s seen him bloodied and bruised and dying, seen him crack, like he saw his father shot down in his own blood, like he’s seen Detective Gordon with his head bowed and his eyes broken and his strength failing him, if not his bravery. Bruce wants people to be as strong to him as his parents were, once upon a time, but he’s learned a lot about the truths of the world in the past year, and one of them is that no one is. No one can be. All he’s got is himself: too young and too scared and too weak and too naïve, but his failings are his own, and nobody else’s. 

Alfred pours himself a cup of tea, adds a slice of lemon, and stirs it three and a half times. Bruce’s mom liked milk and sugar in hers, and he tries to remember her voice, her face, her hugs sometimes. Tries to remember what it felt like when she bent over to kiss his forehead when she tucked him into bed at night. All he’s got are pearls bouncing on the wet cracked sidewalk, and her eyes blank, blank, blank.

“There’s no rush,” Alfred says quietly; he says this every day, knowing that Bruce is going to ignore him. “You’re not going to crack the combination tonight.”

Behind the fireplace, hidden away like so many parts of his dad, there’s a safe door, big enough for a man to walk through, with a complex keypad set into it. It won’t open now, but Bruce is sure that it will; he’s sure that he has the answer somewhere, that his father told him something once or left him something that will let him get through the door, into whatever’s behind, and he’ll finally _understand_. He feels more like a child than ever, trapped outside whatever adult things his father had or was doing, but he can’t be a child anymore, doesn’t know how to be, and the door has to fall. It _has_ to.

Bruce exhales and lets the journal in his lap slip to the floor, pages puddling. Alfred takes a sip of his tea and says nothing else, just watches him, and that gaze used to make him feel safe and then it made him frustrated and then it made him guilty and these days it just makes him tired. Bruce shifts forward, reaches for the teapot, and pours some into the spare cup Alfred always puts on the tray, even though he knows that Bruce hates tea. Bruce adds a slice of lemon, and picks up another teaspoon and stirs it three and a half times.

He takes a sip, even though he knows it’ll be too hot, even though he knows he won’t like it. His head is pounding and it’s late and the truth keeps skidding away from his fingers. 

The tea is still a little too bitter, a little too dry, a little too perfumed, but he likes it more than he did the last time his mom teased him into trying some. Bruce considers it, and takes another sip, and then another, and it doesn’t taste as bad as he remembers it.

Maybe this is what growing up is.


End file.
